Robert Adams
[Photographer and writer, b. 1937, Orange, New Jersey, lives in Astoria, Oregon.]
Yes, photographs are only convincing if the photographer pays attention to the facts of life, but photographs have to point beyond the facts.
Luigi Ghirri
[Photographer, b. 1943, Scandiano, Italy, d. 1992, Reggio Emilia, Italy.]
In photography, the deletion of the space that surrounds the framed image is as important as what is represented; it is thanks to this deletion that the image takes on meaning... inviting us to see the rest of reality that is not represented.
Roland Barthes
[Writer, critic, and theorist, b. 1915, Cherbourg, d. 1980, Paris.]
I am the reference of every photograph, and this is what generates my astonishment in addressing myself to the fundamental question: why is it that I am alive here and now?
Ludwig Wittgenstein
[Philosopher, b. 1889, Vienna, Austria, d. 1951, Cambridge, England.]
We regard the photograph, the picture on our wall, as the object itself (the man, landscape, and so on) depicted there. This need not have been so. We could easily imagine people who did not have this relation to such pictures. Who, for example, would be repelled by photographs, because a face without color and even perhaps a face in reduced proportions struck them as inhuman.
Justine Kurland
[Photographer, b. 1969, Warsaw, New York, lives mostly on the road.]
The naked figures in the landscape have willingly undressed for my camera. They are either perfect beings heroically occupying their Edens, or else they are gardeners after the Fall, lost and exposed to both the elements and the lens.
Joan Fontcuberta
[Photographer, b. 1955, Barcelona, lives in Barcelona.]
I’m not interested in photography because of the camera, lenses, and developing processes, but because it is the repository for all of those intellectual conflicts, all of the problems human have had to deal with in these last decades. I think the twentieth century has been defined by that vision, the photographic culture.
Eddie Adams
[Photojournalist, b. 1933, New Kensington, Pennsylvania, d. 2004, New York.]
People believe them, but photographs do lie, even without manipulation. They are only half-truths.
Frank Gohlke
[Photographer, b. 1942, Wichita Falls, Texas, lives in Southborough, Massachusetts.]
I see the experience of pictures as a kind of cycle, a kind of circular motion in which you’re in the world, then you enter the picture and you’re in a different world (it’s not the same as the one you live in, but recognizable as one you might live in). And then you’re returned to your world with an enlarged sense of its possibilities.
